2015 August

More mini pieces…

So, at the moment, I am really juggling three different builds: I am doing updates on my full scale R2-D2, I am working on a dome for BB-8, even though I am definitively #NOTBUILDINGBB8 .. and then I’ve got this 50% scale build.

The biggest drawback of changing from 40% to 50% build, is that the pieces I had done for my 40% build is now totally useless, so back to scaling up (and fixing some issues with the model) and printing.

This is what the last couple of days have rendered:

These under shoulder details are really tiny. They have been printed with a layer height of 0.05 mm and was printed in two halves, that was just glued together.

This image is taken through my magnifying glass. Building really wreaks havoc on your fingernails and dries up your hands.

Check out the detail on that print, however…

Not printed quite in the same detail level are these shoulder hydraulics. They will look great when sanded and treated with rub and buff though.

The booster covers now in correct scale. The leg struts that I printed last week fits great!

To get a comparison to the full scale: Here is the newly made Large Data Port … or should I say the Tiny Data Port?

The new ankle details.

The new ankles. See that little crack..? That is a small crack when printing in ABS…

Another small crack on the other side..

But no where near as bad as this big one that went half through!

I will do a post about how to fix these things in the future without having to do a totally new print.

By micke|2016-12-06T00:00:09+01:00August 31st, 2015|Building, Mini-R2|Comments Off

Ankle Work

Since the dawn of time… well.. since R2 was finished originally, that is, he’s had a pair of heavy resin bulks under the Ankle Cylinders.

The Ankle Cylinders was scratch built 3 years ago, and was basically a piece of PVC pipe with thin strips of styrene wrapped around it, with custom made end caps.

See this post for the original build: Scratch building ankle cylinders! They have done the trick up until now, but I wanted to have a set that looked a bit better.

The main reason for revisiting this, is that the original pieces have only been taped to the ankle with double stick tape that has (mostly) done the job, but they have had a tendency to fall off.

I don’t want to glue things in place here, as if I need to do any work on the cables inside, I need to be able to remove these to get to an access hole that is hiding behind them.

I had also lost a few of the ankle wedges (see Building an ankle wedge) that is supposed to sit on top of the cylinders. They were also just taped to the ankle…

The total assembly looked like this:

(Mounting the Ankle… stuff)

But now it was time to fix everything in this area. I had not been 100% happy with the aluminium tape wrapped around the pipe, even if it has done the job.

So, armed with my trusty CAD program, the avid reader know that I have been printing Ankle Cylinders in the past.

This is the parts that I drew and printed:

These were printed apart to get the grooves in the cylinder as sharp as possible.

The new ankle cylinders holders. 3D printed, hollow and extremely light. I have glued 12mm magnets inside them for holding them to the ankle later on.

Here are the new wedges. They are a lot sturdier and better than my old ones! These ones also has magnets inside them. The idea is to pin the wedge inbetween them.